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There is no lack of birds, in particular pigeons in the plaza.Place column for Datebook on the sorry state of Hallidie Plaza. I'm sure we have file photos, but something showing how the sunken plaza is forlorn and uninviting and bleak. For a column saying it should be torn out and rebuilt from scratch. Photographer:
Eric Luse / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Let's be honest: Some parts of a big city are bound to be squalid. Crime and vice and desolation are strands of the urban fabric.

What's maddening is when a place that should be something to celebrate instead is a place to avoid.

Which brings us to Hallidie Plaza in San Francisco. But don't look for a place to sit down. Not only was this three-level plaza badly designed to begin with, the benches were ripped out years ago to keep indigents away. Most of the trees were cut down, and bright lights were installed to banish dark corners.

This should be San Francisco's town square, the kind of place where you meet friends to decide where to go next, or just hang out and watch the scene. Instead, the only ones who linger are homeless people selling Street Sheet and pigeons who line the otherwise barren mezzanine.

City officials now say they want to make Hallidie Plaza more inviting. I wish them luck -- and warn them that the job can't be confined to good intentions and efficient management. San Francisco needs to declare the plaza a total loss and start again from the ground up.

Yes, such a move would be expensive. But no other spot in the Bay Area has such potential to be an exciting crossroads -- because no other spot is traversed by so many people drawn from so many races, classes and backgrounds.

There are shoppers carting bags of designer goods, and the occasional anarchist rally. People spill from Muni and the Powell Street BART station on their way to work, or to one of the museums or movie theaters nearby. Tourists line up for the cable cars; chess players line up at the folding tables set in a row along Market Street.

The crowds will only intensify when the Westfield San Francisco Centre doubles in size this fall with the arrival of Bloomingdale's and other retailers. The Old Mint is scheduled to be reborn as a city museum, with construction beginning next year. There's even a downtown housing boom.

The challenge is improving the piece in the center: Hallidie Plaza.

During the past few years, city officials have begun to take stabs at making the plaza work. There have been increased cleaning efforts by the Department of Public Works, and a 2004 design workshop sponsored in part by local businesses. The most recent move came in November, when the city asked for private bids to manage the plaza.

"This is a step toward a bigger vision," says Marshall Foster, Mayor Gavin Newsom's director of city greening. "We want to show the city can maintain the space and make it better, and begin to create a constituency for improving the plaza."

For many public squares, better management would be enough.

Not this one.

When Hallidie Plaza opened in 1973, named in honor of cable car inventor Andrew Hallidie, the idea was to create a sunken plaza that could be a gathering place, a multilevel celebration of urbanity shielded from traffic and throngs.

Oops! We've learned since then that urbanity includes traffic and throngs. The commotion is part of the scene. By telescoping the plaza downward, its users were pulled out of sight and out of the action.

With time the plaza became the terrain of drug dealers and petty criminals as well as street people with no place else to go. Response? In 1998 most of the trees were cut down and the benches were removed. The mezzanine not only was stripped bare, but it was also chained off for several years.

We're left today with brick paving on three levels, the bottom two levels framed by granite walls. There's also a passage below Fifth Street with commercial space filled by a tourist information center, leading to a satellite plaza where you rarely see a soul.

As long as the design stays the way it is, there's only so much that any management plan can do. The plaza will still be an inverted brick-and-concrete fortress. It won't offer vantage points and it won't offer respite.

Here's what I would do: Start by getting rid of the satellite plaza west of Fifth Street.

The 2004 workshop suggested decking over the west area, but I'd fill it in. Cover it with a small glassy jewel of a building -- a visitor's information center to replace the one now downstairs, or a pavilion for the chess players who are the only group that now give Hallidie Plaza any sense of community.

Then replace the main plaza with an inviting street-level public square.

You'd want activity, and much of the activity is already there. There'd be plenty of space for the crafts dealers who now are jammed along the sidewalk, and the flower shop squeezed against the line of people on Powell Street waiting for cable cars. A good design would allow vendors such as these to display their goods in an attractive way.

As for access to the BART station, there could be a small subterranean plaza similar to the one at the Montgomery station, which is snug and near the ground. Or just go for simple stairs and escalators, as at the Embarcadero station.

This is hardly a definitive plan -- just an idea from someone who's passed through the plaza thousands of times and never felt an inclination to pause. The cost would be daunting and the logistics would be complex. San Francisco's politics would make it tougher still: Potential critics would rather find flaws in a plan than work together on a solution.

Foster sees the need for change, despite the logical objections in an era of perennial budget struggles.

"You've got to create a context for public life, where there's something for everyone," he says. "There should be spaces where people come together."

In the long run, San Francisco can't afford to leave such a vital crossroads in such forlorn shape. It sends a message that the public realm doesn't matter. And that's an insult to all of us.